Page 12 of Rookie Mistake
"I'll come back," the trainer says.
The door closes. The corridor light disappears. The blue idle screen is the only illumination.
By the time the door shuts again, my hand is empty and my pulse is not.
I stand. My reading glasses are on the arm of the chair. I pick them up. Hold them. Do not put them on.
"You played better today," I say from the doorway.
He looks at me. His face in the blue light is the face of a man who was one inch from being kissed and who was not going to stop it and who is now sitting in a dark room processing the loss of the inch.
"That's not what you were going to say," he says.
He is correct. What I was going to say, before the trainer, before the door, before the corridor light broke the dark, was something the control would not have authorized and that my mouth was going to produce anyway because my mouth, it appears, has joined the list of things Eli Mercer has made ungovernable.
"It is what I am saying," I say. "What I was going to say is a different conversation."
"When do we have that conversation?"
"When I am ready."
"And when is that?"
I look at him. The reading glasses are in my hand. The control is in my hand, literally, the lenses and the frames, the barrier, the thing I put between myself and the world. Not on my face. In my fingers. The choice of whether to put them back on is mine.
I do not put them on.
"Soon," I say.
I walk out. The corridor is empty. The fluorescent lights hum the way they have in every facility since I was twelve.
The reading glasses go into my jacket pocket instead of onto my face.
This is how it begins. Not with a collapse. With a deviation.
ELI
The suit is Nikolai's. Charcoal, Italian, the kind of wool that costs more per yard than my first car cost per mile. In the hotel bathroom mirror, I look like I belong at a professional event instead of the children's table.
The tie is also his. Black silk. The note that arrived with it at my stall said: Media event tonight. Wear this. Try not to speak without supervision.
I've read the note four times. The handwriting is doing almost as much damage as the suit.
The door to the bathroom lounge opens. Nikolai enters in his own suit (navy, fitted, the shoulders of a man who has been filling doorframes since puberty) and stops when he sees me.
The stop is brief. Less than a second. But I have been tracking Nikolai Sokolov's micro-expressions for five days and I know what a stop means. A stop means the control has received input it was not prepared for. A stop means the analytical brain, which operates three moves ahead of the emotional brain, has been ambushed by the present tense.
I am the present tense.
"Good?" I ask, because I need to say something and the something needs to be casual because the alternative is saying"you stopped when you saw me and the stopping is the best review I've ever received."
He walks toward me. The walking is measured, the Nikolai walk, each step the product of a decision rather than a reflex. He stops in front of me. He looks at the tie.
"Crooked," he says.
He reaches for the knot. His fingers are at my throat. The fingers are precise and warm and operating with the focused competence of a man who has been tying ties since his mother entered him in youth skating competitions at age eight and who considers a properly executed Windsor knot a matter of personal honor.
His face is close. I can see the texture of his beard. The line where the dark skin meets the darker hair. The concentration in his eyes, which are lowered to the knot and which are not looking at my face because looking at my face would require acknowledging the proximity and the proximity is the thing the control is trying not to process.
